Making Indians Proud of Their Nationality

By PREM MITAL

According to Adam Osborne, Indians "were proud of their nationality and heritage" (India Post, May 23), and he himself, an English boy born of an English father and a Polish mother raised in the ashram of Shri Ramana Maharishi in Tamil Nadu, still after decades retains "a pride in his roots?" And the other native Indians are said to confess "I am not proud that I am an Indian." Why is there such a striking difference and anomaly? How is it that in one person’s case, the pride remains intact while in the most others it has become extinct?

"Is the reason India’s colonial heritage?" Osborne asks and skirts the issue by his nonchalant "who knows?" and "whatever" answer, and plods on to suggest that "the day the Indians learn pride, India will rapidly move out of its third world status to become one of the world’s major industrial powers."

How does anyone "learn" pride? By being educated in an ashram under a special teacher like Ramana Maharshi? Does learning about one’s heritage and roots matter at all? What characteristics of the Indian heritage and roots so remarkably impressed "an English boy," I wish he had written some words about them. But, contrary to the wisdom of his own words, Osborne tells us that someday, after a dream is realized, he will return to India, "to preach" Indian pride and that "Indians must learn to be proud of being Indians just as Singapore’s nationals are..."

Apparently, his proposition is that Indians develop new roots-- Indian roots -forget their heritage -- and become proud "as Indians" in order to become a big industrial power; then the country’s ills, such as divisive differences, corruption, etc will be taken care of.

Such an approach perhaps can help India become a world power, but for that to happen India will require leaders of the caliber of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Jefferson, etc. But, given the reality of India’s history, that prospect is rather dim.

Anyway, how do you "teach" pride to any people? Pride is a matter of one’s spirit, strength, heritage and achievement. In Indians’ case, all these virtues have been long absent.

Let me remind that the country Osborne and others call India is not the India anymore. The India, which the Mughals and the British colonized and ruled, was sub-continent, stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Afghanistan to Assam. The whole world called it Hindustan--the Land of the Hindus like China is for and of the Chinese-- and its shine radiated to the four corners of world. Even the Islamic fundamentalist Mughal rulers went by this name during their long imperialistic reign though they did their brutest best to destroy the native Hindu pride and spiritual heritage and succeeded to quite a great extent. But the British went even a step further: they changed the very name of the country to a new English name, India, to demean the Hindus and make them forget forever their heritage and their (national) identity. And in this, they succeeded remarkably better than the Islamist Mughals. For it is thus the Hindus (or Hindustanis) were induced to think and behave in divisive terms of Punjabis, Gujaratis, Tamils, Telugus, Sikhs, etc.

The veracity of above thesis is ample brought home in the writings of the British historian and International Affairs expert, the late Arnold J Toynbee. In The World And The West (Oxford University Press, 1953), for instance, Toynbee says, "India is a whole world in herself; she is one great non-Western society that has been not merely attacked and hit, but overrun and conquered outright by Western arms. ... Our Western iron has probably entered deeper into India’s soul.

"Perhaps India would not have been conquered by Western arms if she had not been conquered by Muslim arms first."

Toynbee further states: "The Mughal, last wave of Muslim conquerors, arrived not many years after the first landing in India, in 1498, of the Portuguese, the first wave of Westerner mariners." When in the 18th century "Mughal peace fell to pieces, it left legacies that made it not so difficult for the Mughals’ British successors to reassemble the fragments of the Mughal empire."

These legacies were: (1) An imperial land-revenue organization which ran by its own momentum and (2) it ran on the Indian habit, and the conditioning of Indian hearts and minds to acquiesce, by force of habit, in an empire imposed on India by the alien conquerors.

Thus it is through the repeated armed aggressions, mass murders, plunder, rape of their women and forced conversions that the Hindus’ soul has become scarred, their hearts and minds entombed into a perpetual state of fear-psychosis and cognitive disorder and they have slavish (chamcha) mentality. That is how the nominal Hindu leaders (Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Desai et al) conveniently walked to Delhi’s Lal Qila, acquiescing in the scheme for the country’s dismemberment; only that’s how they have taken to the fig leaf-secularism to hide the ugly nudity of their acquiescence in creation of Islamic Pakistan on two- religion basis. Surely, that’s how they cling to the colonialist’s given name, India; and ironically that’s how the Indian Government finances Muslims’ Haj pilgrimage to a foreign country while it makes the Hindus visiting their shrines in the country pay a pilgrimage tax. As Publisher A Ghosh questions, "Have we gone blind?"

No wonder, even after fifty years of ‘independence’ most Indians behave like "the Child who Never Grew" (Pearl S Buck). Their slavish habit persists and pervades all round, it is more conspicuous in the highly- educated and in those in the high offices, and there is no limit to it. Few examples are: the President, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister have themselves recently offered to tell the Chinese rulers that "Tibet belongs to China" when the Tibetans themselves have not said so, when their leader Dalai Lama and hundreds of thousands of them have been living in India as exiles since China’s invasion of their country four decades ago. They all have often repeated that there is "no Kashmir problem?" Kashmir belongs to India, yet the Indians are not allowed to go and live in Kashmir.

So, Indians’ real problem is not their lack of national pride -- most Americans don’t have it either, Yet America is the world’s supermost (industrial) power. Rather, it is their chronic disease on the mental and spiritual levels. How to address it, is the issue!

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